John Smedley talks free-to-play across the industry

@smg77 I wouldn't say SOE games are bad, but SOE doesn't handle games well.

After my experience with SWG, I've been steering clear of SOE; however I was interested in DCUO, but they were building hype with no backing. "You can do all these great things!" They never would show game play of those great things, just talk about it. And when they did, it was lolnowayinhellwouldipayforthat scenario.

F2P really needs a micro-transaction format adjustment, the cash grab mindset is worse than a subscription in most cases. Be nice to play a game and enjoy it, rather than fretting over a purchase to "help" you have fun.

@smg77

Both EQ1 and 2 still seem to be doing pretty well.

@Graill440

Yeah, because revenue didn't increase for Lotro, DDO, and AoC when they went FTP. Oh wait...

Hybrid FTP and sub MMOs are the future.

@Graill440

Free to play in its own right won't, but SOE and Smedley are talking about Freemium, where you have mico transactions and optional subscriptions.

That will eclipse subscription only.

@Graill440

+1 for the blithering clown, Smedly is one of the worse things to happen to the MMO market, you can't get much more hypocritical than him.


F2P is a great way for sub-par games to make money. And SOE is the king of Sub-par games, the day they killed SWG, admitted it, and did nothing, the company started churning out f2p garbage to soak up cash.

The only good F2P game is League of Legends, because you can't buy power. Every other f2p in game market I've looked in has power increasing items, no matter how small, in the end it does make a difference.

The F2P market is also horribly skewed, any population number that comes out of any F2P game is a huge overestimation, I guarantee you that 90% of the F2P community has their hand in multiple games. So if you're going to say "Free Realms hit 2 000 000 players", that number includes all the people that say "why not?!" and downloaded the game, played it for 10 minutes, realized it was garbage and required payment to actually do anything fun and uninstalled it, they are now officially wasted space in SOE's horribly protected database(thanks for the new debit number SOE!)

While on the subscription side of things you have happy players, knowing they are getting all they can out of the game for 2 hours of minimum wage pay per month. When you say "Hello Kitty Online reached 10 000 000 subscribers, that means you are making roughly 150 000 000 per month.

In general, a f2p game requires upwards of 2 to 3 times the cost of a subscription game, to get the same level of content.

If the company is well established, and has 50 million to dump into a 5-7 year development, A subscription is going to be the way to go.

The only problem now is no game has managed to hold on to more than 1/3 of it's purchasers past month 4(end of 3 month sub pack) or in the case of DCUO: hold on to 1/12th of it's purchasers past 2 weeks.


now on the topic of DCUO and F2P, how can i put this? THE F&$^NG GAME WAS SUPPOSED TO BE F2P FROM THE START, go look at all my deleted posts on the DCUO boards explaining to all the "this game sucks" post, why it sucked. The moment i hit 30 in 3 days, and got bored with the "end game" (50% recycled) content in 5 days, i said "hey.. wait... wasn't this game suppose.... free???? *goes to internet* 'SOE heavily eluded to a f2p model' " DURR!!

end_mini_rant(true);

Then the whole "The subscription pays for all the new content updates on a monthly basis"
Patch 1, 2 months, patch 2: 3 months patch 3: 4 months, hacked, see a pattern?
But wait! There's more
Were making more content, BUT YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT SUCKERS!!!!, all you who want to play with Hard Light get to give us another month of sub! But were going to make it free in 2 months, so HA, We have yet again scammed money from the only loyal fans we have(those still playing DCUO after month 4) BUT YOU GET SUPER SERVERS!!!! OOZZ MY GAWDZ!

bottom line, F2P sucks, SOE Sucks, Subs rule!!

Commence the down voting!!

@Valkenr

John Smedley = The Peter Molyneaux syndrome applied to MMOs??

/weep

I hope DCUO fares better. It's kinda boring on the PS3....

@Oyjord

Smedbucks still has no cred, everyone knows he is a lieing, greedy POS.

@Oyjord

I still would still say Smed has negative credibility, most of the arrogant decisions made by him and the arrogant people he placed in charge of games like DCUO are the reason those games failed and now have to go to a F2P model because they weren't successful enough to make heaps of money like the successfully run games can.

@Paradigm68

Good is subjective.

@Yellowdancer Good enough to sustain enough interest and make a profit via subscriptions however is a quantifiable metric.

@Paradigm68 Why does the vector of the profit matter? Money is money.

@Furdinand Really? Ok, so it doesn't matter if a company takes in more (profit) or less (loss) than it is spending?

@Tizmah
The 2004-2008ish MMO market was the best, right before Warhammer released 1.1 and unbalanced the game thinking the problem was class balance, not the fact that 66% of the population played on the "Evil" side in a open world campaign MMO. It scares me that some of those people are in the ToR team sometimes. Anyway, that was when there was this huge population of PvP players with nowhere to go(now i think they are mostly playing LoL)

It was a great time, All the highschoolers where playing F2P games(that really didn't need any money put in to progress, Joymax was pretty good about that. Then you had WoW, WAR, SWG, the EQ's and CoH. All where solid games, but WoW got old, SWG got the smedly smack, WAR took a population hit and din't consolidate server fast enough, EQ got old and COH was ruined with Issue 13's PvP revamp, and it got old.

Warhammer seemed to be the start of the market fall, they released the game a good 4-6 months before it was ready(thanks EA), and every few months after that another game would come out, riddled with bugs, KNOWN BUGS, some that made the game unplayable. And this cycle will continue.

My hope is that whenever ToR comes out(the longer it takes, the more hope i have) they will have a generally bug free game, nothing game breaking, stuff like seeing through solid objects at the correct camera angle, not Warhammer, running along and step in an invisible hole and get stuck and have to get a CSR because there is no /stuck command yet.

The MMO community is counting on bioware to set the new example.